The Red Turtle/La tortue rouge

France, Belgium, Japan, USA 2016 

Dir: Michael Dudok de Wit 

80 mins

Cast: Tom Hudson, Baptiste Goy, Axel Devillers, Barbara Beretta

Rating: PG

If you ever wondered what the art of Hergé might look like brought to life by Studio Ghibli, then The Red Turtle should finally answer that question. This gorgeous French-Belgian-Japanese co-production was the result of the Tokyo-based animation powerhouse offering a gig to Dutch-British animator Michael Dudok de Wit, so impressed were they with his 2000 Oscar-winning short Father And Daughter. And The Red Turtle is very much a spiritual successor to that charcoal-smudged, eight-minute film: both centre on a very small family of characters; both shimmer with carefully applied magic-realism; both deal with mortality; both place tiny figures in awesome landscapes; and both are entirely dialogue-free.

If the prospect of watching a silent animated feature (rather than one with songs) worries you, rest easy. The Red Turtle is so visually captivating you wonder if any dialogue (beyond the occasional shout of, “Hey!”) would break the spell. Under Dudok de Wit’s supervision, the Ghibli animators make moving art out of tumbling, bubbling surf, the swaying of bamboo forests and the playful skittering of crabs. ...

 ... it’s a welcome reminder of what feature animation can offer when you venture far beyond its crowded mainland, noisily populated by pixel-generated talking animals and whatever the hell the Minions are. It’s a profoundly soothing experience — like a tropical holiday for the multiplexed mind.

Dan Jolin, Empire Magazine

French/Japanese fable The Red Turtle is one of those rare animated movies that transports you to a different setting without demanding that you focus on narrative or character development. Instead, viewers are encouraged to fall in love with an environment, specifically a small tropical island on which a nondescript, mute castaway inexplicably finds himself shipwrecked. This focus on setting over narrative is crucial since The Red Turtle follows the normalization of one man’s romance with nature. Because this is a fable, the above-mentioned romance is quite literal: our nameless castaway falls in love with a shapeshifting turtle that transforms into a beautiful naked woman. ...

 The Red Turtle also draws viewers in by immersing us in a fully-realized microcosm. Dudok de Wit, co-writer Pascale Ferran, and an accomplished battalion of animators have created a thoroughly disarming fairy tale, one that initially appears familiar, but eventually reveals itself to be something new, and altogether unexpected.

Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com

... The Red Turtle is perhaps too serene, overall, to capture the mood of many modern filmgoers, but it has a grace and poetry about it which, together with its charming animation, are bound to win it a dedicated legion of fans.

Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film